Vajrasana and the quest for non-heroic Architecture

CITY TALKS: Vajrasana and the quest for non-heroic Architecture- Dr Gill Matthewson

Considering whether architecture needs to be a gendered operation

City Gallery Wellington, Civic Square
Monday 11September 2017, 6pm
Free entry

Gill Matthewson is an architect and academic committed to understanding the ways that gender contributes to the shaping of architects and architecture.

Gill has extensive experience both as a practising architect and as an academic. Throughout her career she has returned again and again to the issue of women and architecture.

She is a strong advocate of addressing gender discrimination in the discipline and contributes regular commentary and analysis on contemporary issues in architecture to Parlour, an organisation devoted to advocating for gender equity in architecture, and other professional publications, including commentary on the use and misuse of statistics.

Along with presenting some of her research findings, Gill will discuss her evolving thoughts on how gender might be manifest in architectural projects. Using the Vajrasana Buddhist Retreat Centre in Suffolk, United Kingdom as example, Gill will discuss its collaborative process and non-heroic architecture. The Retreat Centre is by Walters and Cohen Architects and the first new building in the UK designed specifically around Buddhist practice.The project is notable for its engaged and creative client team — including an architect, artist, poet and psychiatrist who helped formulate the spaces - and Gill will discuss how this collaborative team and their efforts impacted on the resulting building.

City Talks is an ongoing series initiated by the New Zealand Institute of Architects Wellington Branch and presented in partnership with City Gallery Wellington. Its purpose is to foster discussion about architecture for a broader audience in a city that cares to openly discuss ideas relevant to our future.

Gill Matthewson

Matthewson was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and educated at Tawa College. She received her bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Auckland, School of Architecture, in New Zealand, followed by a master's degree in architecture from University of East London for a study on the work of Lilly Reich titled "Sex, Lies and the Barcelona Pavilion" in 1994. She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland in 2015 on the topic "Dimensions of Gender: Women's Careers in the Australian Architecture Profession", for which she received the Dean's Award for Outstanding Thesis.

She has practiced architecture full-time for a decade, including at the firm Claire Chamber Architects, New Zealand and at Matrix Feminist Design Cooperative in England.

Matthewson is a co-founder of Parlour: women, equity, architecture, an organisation devoted to advocating for gender equity in architecture, and a co-editor of the Parlour website. Matthewson's extensive statistical map of the participation of women in the architecture profession in Australia has been an important base for Parlour's advocacy. This work has been extended into demographic studies of the Australian architecture profession as a whole and her work informs the reporting undertaken by the Architects Accreditation Council of Australia. She is acknowledged as the national expert on the demographics of the profession.

The talk will be followed by refreshments.

For further information and images for reproduction please contact the City Talks team on wellington@nzia.co.nz or:

Sharon Jansen James Fenton
+64 21 499 305 +64 21 434 764

sharon@sj-a.co.nz james@jamesfentonarchitect.co.nz

City Talks are free to attend and held in the Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington, Civic Square. The talk schedule is as follows:

Monday 16 October, 6pm

Raupo to Deco- Archivist Adrian Humphris

Monday 20th October

I bought a Building - Did I mean to do that? – Architect Malcolm Walker

ENDS

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